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Common Lighting Mistakes

we're going to talk about 10 things toe. Look for in your photos that if you see them, it's wrong. I will tell you I hate that word like saying something's wrong, but it's generally either not that flattering or it's distracting in your photograph. If you're doing it on purpose, that's one thing. But this is something to learn to notice in your photos. That is, perhaps not helping you achieve your lighting goals, so let's just jump right into them, All right, so first one, your main light is too low, and I put you know, you guys can't really see it that well. But the, uh, X is for the bad side. On the left check mark is for the improved side when you are looking at your image. If you see shadows from the nose cast like you see on the left hand side, slightly upward or a crossed, your main light is too low. A lot of times you will experience this. If you have a large soft box in a very, uh, in a very short room, what would you call it? Low ceilings. So you have your subject standing and...

a little bit of the soft box above them, but most of it is below them, and it will fill from below. In this case, this is an octave box about even with the shoulder instead of nine inches above eye level, as we have on this side. So notice here. Look how I think her face looks more slender in this image and she has a little bit of a shadow underneath her lips that makes her lip look a little bit fuller and notice she has a little bit more of cheekbones and jawline. So this is what you look for for your main light being Ah, bit too low. Can I did want to say there was a I think it was a Givenchy. Add in the most recent version addition of Vogue where, like the lights way down here. Okay, like granted, there's times to break this rule. But if you're not intending to watch out for the shape of the shadow of the nose should go to the side or slightly down next one. Your main light Too high, Like the picture on the left. One thing that you want to see is you do want to see catch lights in the eyes, Some kind of sparkle, some kind of indication of what? That main light iss I do not. I can barely kind of see when maybe in this I but not really. And this will definitely happen if you have subjects, would just deeper sunken eyes. Ah, lot of times, even if you're like, isn't that high and it's the same places you always keep it well, your subject comes in and they have a different type of face, and it might not be the light right, the right light for them anymore, so you might have to lower it a little bit. Another rule that I learned which I think is kind of true is you don't usually want the shadow from the nose to hit the lip. That usually means the light is a little bit high. It could be just above it, but when it starts crossing over, they kind of just blend together. So you might wanna watch for that as well. The one on the right is improved height just lower, so there's catch lights in the eyes. The shadows aren't so long, okay? Problem number three, and it doesn't mean it ruins a photo always but highlights on the nose created by your back room lights. This is what I was looking for when I kept saying Okay, so I'm watching when I'm placing my barn doors or the strip banks and watching for the highlights in the face. I'm looking for these right here on the left hand photo the highlight on either side of her nose when those are really bright or sometimes will just be like a really wide they catch on this part of the face. Your eye goes to whatever's lightest in the picture. And sure, I go to the highlights. What? I'm definitely drawn to her nose over and over again. This photo isn't a terrible illustration of it, but I've seen many times worse. So watch out for when those highlights are drawing attention to things you don't want them to be drawing attention. Thio. Okay, number four over exposed rim lights. I'm totally fine with having really bright room lights to separate the subject from the background. I don't I don't even require certain ratio. It can be very, very bright. It can make it look like the subject is almost cut out from the background. But when they're so overexposed that there's zero detail, you can't see any skin texture. It just looks like you painted white on either side of their face or on their shoulder, for example. That becomes distracting and doesn't usually enhance your photograph. So if you see something like this, you know that it's over exposed. You just need to dial it down a little bit, turned down the power of those room lights a tad bit so that you bring back detail. Okay, Number five lens flare from back room lights, and we'll probably play with this a little bit tomorrow, where I'll show you a demo of when it works and when. It doesn't when you're photographing your subjects and you have your shooting towards your subject and you have to strip banks or you have to barn doors depending on the size of your space. A lot of times you get lens flare because, especially if it's a really tight space, you end up with those rim lights right behind your subject, which is pointing straight back at camera, which gives you lens where so you wanna watch out for and in these two frames. I didn't do anything with my camera. What I did is one of two things in between. I mean, pretend this is the barn doors, and I grab this. And between my back room light and my subject, you don't wanna put a piece of foam core here because then the light doesn't hit your subject anymore. You lose your room light. But you could put it here. Just that a frame so that that spill of light doesn't hit the camera anymore. So you're using these things called flags or Goebbels. You're going between your blocking off the light. So if you're in a tiny space and you're trying to matter what you do, you're moving the lights back, your angling them in your England left and right, and you can't get rid of that lens flare. Try just pieces of foam core and you don't want them. So they're blocking the light off the subject. But even just a little bit further up out of frame will help you out. The other thing to keep in mind is, if you have a subject here, if you have your barn doors or your light, I'm the model right now. Okay, If you have your like the right right behind your subject pointed back at camera, it's the angle at the camera that creates lens flare because it's pointed, pointed right back towards your lens. If you can finagle an angle that pulls it off to the side a little bit, feathers it in a little bit, just a little bit. So it's not straight back at the lens. That usually helps reduce some of the lens flare, and I'll show you a live demonstration of that tomorrow. So just know that part is coming as well. And that's what you're looking for on the right. You don't wanna have any decrease. Contrast. Notice the shadows aren't black on the left anymore, and the background has a haze to it. Unless that was your intention. You wanna watch out for that? The next one. As we will also demonstrate tomorrow, you wanna watch out for overexposed backgrounds that aren't on purpose. There's sometimes where it looks good, but most of time it doesn't because look what happened. That background was so overexposed it was so bright that it started wrapping around the subject, and there's no blacks at all and look at the black of her pants in this photo. There is no black. It created lens flare and washed out the photo, and it made it look dull. And you see this a lot in portrait when someone's shooting on a white background that just to make sure that it was really white, they made it to white and it started to flatten out the photograph. So we'll talk about tomorrow, what you're looking for, how you might meet her to try to even out the background. But you definitely want to avoid flare like that. That gives you this kind of decrease contrast everywhere. All right, Number seven when you're shooting clamshell light and the bottom light is too bright. The picture on the left is the problem. Photograph on what you notice is this chin neck area is brighter than even her foreheads. Brighter than any other place on her face. It is definitely overpowering. I didn't move the lights, I didn't do it. It didn't change the modifiers. All I did for the right photo is I just turned down the power off that bottom light which was a silver dish, and it is much more flattering on the right in the photograph over here? A. It brings out the bags under her eyes. The bottom light actually draws attention to that, and then also, if you really look at it, her face looks much wider on the photo on the left because it's illuminating underneath her cheeks. It's making her cheeks look fuller. It's making her jawline disappear. It's making her entire face look wider. Do you really want to be careful of too much bottom line? And in this case, it is clamshell light with two lights. But you can also do this with the reflector. You can actually incorrectly filled with a reflector that reflectors catching too much light, and it's too low. You can get a similar bottom. Fill a fact, so watch out for too strong of a bottom light or fill light when you are doing clamshell lighting. Number eight Cross light. Okay, so this is the before, all right, so let's say I'm setting up a portrait and I have one light on my subjects, and I want to fill in the shadow area. This is pretty much all of my original lighting looks like, and it's not that it looks terrible, but it's not exactly flattering. What I would do is it set up one umbrella on one side for Main Light and then another on the other side for Phil, and it would cancel each other out. And in some instances you actually get double shadows. You have a shadow on her nose on the right, and then shadow cast over here and tends to make a person's face look wider, and it makes it look really, really flat. And there's better ways to flat like than than this. And look where it has means drawing attention to the highlights on her cheeks and the shadows underneath your eyes. It's not really doing anything for her. So you, if you're going to flat light, don't have to opposing lights that are crossing in the middle. Instead, you should have a light more to the front that's flatter with a fill. We're a broader light. Not to opposing light sources, huh? And here is an example of a better way to do it. Instead of adding a completely other light source like we did here, like two umbrellas that would be a white silk card. So it's not. Actually another light source is just kind of softening out the shadows instead of giving you another direction of light. Okay, Number nine would be the wrong beauty dish angle. So you heard me keep asking or saying Okay, I need to change this angle. I want that center dish or that center circle reflector to be pointed right at your face. If you miss the face, this is what the light looks like. And that Z I mean, in my opinion, it's pretty awful. It's really harsh, too bright on her nose and her cheeks. It's a long shadow. Its's not really flattering, comparatively to the right now. Not that this is terrible light, but this is significantly better. The shadows and highlights aren't as contrast. C and the shadow on her nose isn't dramatic. So this is just from I when I was demo ing, that's when I'm shooting it. Two inches of angle could make that big of a difference. So you've got to kind of watch that if you have a subject who is posing for you and there's full length of the beauty dish and they move now, they could be in a totally different light and they could actually be hitting the bad lights. Just got to kind of watch out for it, alright. And number 10, I put this in his number to end out the day because this is the question I've gotten 800 billion times, and so I wanted to make sure I answered it. When do you use a gold reflector in the studio? And the answer is I never dio I never use pure gold in the studio ever. Um, what ends up happening is your main light. All of these lights are daylight balanced when you're using studio strobes, so they're white light. And if you add a gold reflector, whether it's underneath the chin, whether it's to the side all of a sudden, there's like, a warmer tone that doesn't make sense to your mind. So in this instance, this is when I put a gold reflector underneath her chin and actually, this wasn't even a gold. This was a silver gold. This is halfway gold. This is not even the full shiny gold reflector. And so you get this, like just kind of yellowish hue underneath her chin. That doesn't make sense If you look at the photo on the right and you think it's not warm enough, it just looks a little bit cool. Don't fix it by adding a gold reflector because all that does is add like mixed light sources. How you fix that is by improving your white balance. Since we had our little color checker that we were looking at and this was on day one, they had the had the different swatches You could choose for your neutral point. And if you choose a different Swatch, it'll actually warm up the photo. You would want to do that to warm up the photo rather than well, let me add, Ah, Gold Reflector one warms up the whole photo. One gives you kind of mixed cross color of light. All right, so those are my 10 common lighting mistakes that you wanna watch out for. I would definitely go through those, and I sure many of you can look at some of the photos in your portfolio and go, Oh, but don't worry, it doesn't mean throw them out just as you go forward. Keep an eye out for that